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From Slavery to Debt-Bondage: Big Tobacco’s Addiction to Cheap Labor

I was in North Carolina last week, marching through the streets of Winston-Salem with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) to demand collective bargaining rights for farmworkers who harvest tobacco. As these workers shared their stories about unjust conditions in the fields and sub-poverty earnings, I was struck by the similarities between tobacco industry exploitation in my own country and what our partners in Malawi, the Center for Social Concern (CSC) and Tobacco and Allied Workers Union of Malawi (TOAWUM), are fighting against.

Cigarette manufacturers and leaf buyers perpetuate a global system of inequity that bolsters corporate profits at the expense of those who labor at the bottom of the tobacco supply chain. It is long past time for that system to end, and be replaced by a more fair tobacco trade that respects the workers who harvest this toxic crop.

Today’s system is built on a long history of abuses in the tobacco trade. British colonists in Virginia learned how to farm tobacco from Native Americans in the 16th century, and began sending seeds and dried tobacco leaves back to Britain in 1586. The Carolina colony was established in 1663, in part by Virginia tobacco farmers looking for additional land on which to grow their crop. The slave trade boomed along with the tobacco trade in the United States during the 18th century, and by the end of the 19th century North Carolina had emerged as the most important tobacco-producer in the United States, with the largest tobacco companies headquartered there.

Meanwhile, Great Britain was spreading tobacco throughout its other colonies. The British established tobacco plantations in Malawi when it took colonial control of the territory, then called Nyasaland, in 1891. It was a significant cash crop during the time of colonization, and through independence in 1964, but really took off in the 1970’s, when tobacco companies began shifting production away from established economies and into the developing world. Malawi was ruled at the time by its “president for life,” Hastings Banda, who consolidated tobacco production among an elite group of estate owners with the exclusive right to export tobacco. Reforms in the 1990’s, and Banda’s fall from power in the same period, helped to liberalize the market, however, to this day the land on which tobacco is grown remains in the hands of a small number of people supported by a system of political patronage. Tobacco is a big player in Malawian politics. Malawi collects more than 50% of its foreign earnings from tobacco exports to the U.S.A. and more than 70 other countries, making it the most tobacco-dependent country in the world.

Tobacco’s colonial legacy has left indelible marks on its trade in both North Carolina and Malawi. When slavery was abolished in the United States after the Civil War, tobacco production shifted to a sharecropping system in which poor, largely African-American farmworkers were tenants on larger plantations. Tenant farmers were responsible for tobacco production on a designated piece of land and contracted to sell that tobacco exclusively to the landowner for a share in the final profit. That system persisted in North Carolina until the 1940’s, when many sharecroppers went north in search of jobs at booming pre-war factories.

Today, tobacco field workers in the United States are mostly migrant laborers from Central America who are either undocumented or here on temporary work visas. It is common for them to have to pay for those jobs, putting them in debt to labor brokers. Threats of job loss or calls to immigration authorities can be used to keep workers working despite the sub-poverty wages, grueling hours, lack of access to clean water or restroom facilities, poor housing and risk of green tobacco sickness (a.k.a nicotine poisoning), sunstroke or other health risks.

In Malawi, most tobacco farmworkers are also migrant workers. They come from the south of the country to work as tenant farmers in a system nearly identical to the sharecropping previously used in the United States. Tenant farmers are dependent on their landowners not only for land and access to market, but often for inputs like seed and fertilizer, and even for food or other supplies to support their families before they get their cut of the harvest profits. Landowners usually provide these goods in the forms of debt to be paid off after the harvest, which is why tenant farming so often traps workers in debt bondage. Tenant farmers are also dependent on their families to provide unpaid labor to harvest the crop, and the continuation of the tenancy system in Malawi is a large part of the reason why Malawi has one of the highest rates of child labor on the African continent. The ways in which the tobacco trade contributes to child labor and conditions of human trafficking have been documented by both the United Nations and U.S. Department of State. Our partners at CSC also produced an excellent report recently describing the conditions of tenant farmers with recommendations for ending this abusive system.

In both Malawi and the United States, the prevalence of debt bondage and lack of alternative income frequently forces tobacco farmworkers to bring their children to the fields, where they face the same hazardous conditions and are also vulnerable to nicotine poisoning. The children of tobacco farmworkers are less likely to finish their education in both countries, robbing them of future employment and locking them into generational cycles of poverty.

To break this cycle of poverty and put tobacco’s history of worker exploitation in the past, tobacco farmworkers must be empowered in the fields. Cigarette manufacturers and leaf buyers must both respect the rights of these workers and take responsibility for ensuring adequate health and safety protections in the fields. In all countries that produce tobacco, the companies that buy and sell tobacco leaf must work with representative worker organizations to develop systems in which the workers in tobacco fields can collectively bargain for better conditions, and establish a grievance procedure for workers to report abuses and resolve issues in a legal process. That’s why we have joined nearly 50 other NGOs in calling on the tobacco industry to sign an agreement with FLOC to establish a mechanism in North Carolina that would grant tobacco workers access to these important protections.

But legal and regulatory changes also need to be made to ensure the rights of tobacco farmworkers are recognized and enforced.

In Malawi, that means critical legal reforms that will prohibit the most abusive practices that have emerged under the tenancy farming system and provide tenant farmers access to legal remedy when landowners do not live up to their agreements. At the same time, Malawi needs to break its dependence on tobacco and engage in programs to alternative livelihoods as well as markets for healthy food and cash crops.

In North Carolina, farmworkers continue to be excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which makes it more difficult for them to organize into unions and excludes them from key protections surrounding wages and working hours. This exemption should end for all farmworkers, including those that grow tobacco, and any work that involves directly touching tobacco should be designated as hazardous work inappropriate for children under the age of 18.

It is time for the tobacco trade to move out of the 18th century and into a more promising future in which tobacco workers make a living wage for a fair days’ work and their children can go to school rather than to the fields. For this transition to happen, farmworkers must be empowered as an active, vital link in the tobacco supply chain, rather than a consideration in profit maximization models.